Too much fun: Chronicle food czar Michael Bauer reflects on restaurant reviewers' new reality, after all the tweeting and Facebook friending and blogging the Internets have given rise to. For those of you who abase yourself in gray office cubes and imagine the life of a food critic to be like that Julia Roberts movie, where she's supposed to be some big-time food reviewer but does little else besides getting all tangled up in ridiculously hilarious miscommunications? Savor your schadenfreude while it's hot -- Mr. Bauer's doing more work now than he ever did. Here he is in answer to a reader speculating on whether or not he draws extra pay for blogging:
Like others who are multi-tasking these days, I didn't get a raise when I started the blog. All of us in newspapers are doing tasks we never thought we'd do a decade ago before blogs and Twitter. We're reinventing what we do every day. I was at the Association of Food Journalists conference in New Orleans last month and, across the board, my colleagues are doing about twice as much work as they once did, juggling newsprint, video and Internet chores. It's been an interesting and challenging ride as we try to straddle the different mediums. It's more work, but it's also more fun.To which some wag -- a reader -- who goes by the name goodgolly commented: "You get what you pay for..." Triple snap!
As staff writer for the East Bay Express, Kauffman won a 2006 James Beard Award for newspaper reporting on nutrition or consumer issues. The Association of Food Journalists awarded Kauffman First Place in newspaper restaurant criticism in 2006, and again this year. Kauffman also won a 2009 IACP Bert Greene Award in the Internet category for a Seattle Weekly blog post about one of the nation's first pig slaughter and cooking classes.
"I'm thrilled to be coming back to San Francisco," Kauffman told SFoodie. "Do you know how much I've missed good Cantonese seafood?"
Kauffman began his career in the kitchen, including a two-year stint at now-defunct Socca (currently home to Aziza). He was staff critic at the Express from 2001 to 2006. In Seattle, Kauffman founded Voracious, the first food blog in the Village Voice Media chain.
Expect to see Kauffman's SF Weekly byline in early January.
Love popcorn? After reading this, maybe not so much.
The Today Show is offering up news many movie-goers might already suspect: Even without "butter," theater popcorn is way far from healthy. New lab results from the Center for Science in the Public Interest show that a medium popcorn and a soda serve up a whopping 1,610 calories, with 60 grams of saturated fat from coconut oil. Coconut oil contains 90 percent saturated fat, and those 60 grams are the suggested limit for three days of eating. Lard, in comparison, has 40 percent saturated fat, meaning it'd be far healthier for theaters to pop corn in pork fat than coconut oil. (Note to Boccalone and Humphry Slocombe: Any chance you'll be taking over concessions at the Roxie?)
If you'd rather get the same calories elsewhere than in a single box of popcorn, it takes three Quarter Pounders and 12 pats of butter to get the same amount of fat. For slightly healthier popcorn, seek out Cinemark theaters (the Century Centre 9 at Westfield Shopping Centre and CineArts @ Empire in West Portal), which pop in canola oil, resulting in lower levels of saturated fat. But still.
Muffins ($2.50) deliver a similar sense of quiet surprise, like the burst of tangy zest in the orange-poppyseed. And the pumpkin has a deliciously squashy intensity. Really, what could be more kawaii?
Café at New People 1746 Post (at Webster)
It's easy to participate: Saddle up and order any of the four featured cocktails from master mixologist Jacques Bezuidenhout. A buck from each Cocktails for a Cure purchase goes to the cause (see the list of beneficiaries here). Get your drink on locally at Grand Café, Harry Denton's Starlight Room, Scala's, and others. Bezuidenhout's creations range from the Orange Blossom Fizz, a mashup of Belvedere orange, St. Germain elderflower liqueur, pineapple juice, and sparkling wine, to the more classic Grapefruit Spritzer: Ketel One Citroen with Campari, grapefruit juice, and club soda. The promotion ends Dec. 1, World AIDS day.
Prop. 8 haters, take note: Apparently, Utah is not on board. Kimpton's statement on that is terse: "Cocktails for a Cure promotion not available at Bambara in Salt Lake City, UT." What's that all about?
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From Dana Goodyear's previous fist-bump with Pulitzer Prize-winning LA Weekly food critic Jonathan Gold, to Calvin Trillin's poutine exposé, the New Yorker has offered up scrumptious reads of late, but Lunch with M, John Colapinto's chronicle of lunch at Jean Georges with a Michelin inspector, is one we've pored over a few times already.
We're particularly fascinated by the idea that Michelin inspectors are experts by virtue of their training, experience, and education. A degree in hospitality, cooking, or hotel management is a prerequisite, which makes some sense, but it's also suggested -- by M herself, as she carves up a foie gras brulée -- that professionals like her and her colleagues may be endowed with biological advantages when it comes to discerning flavors. In M's words, "cooking is a science, and either it's right or it's wrong." But what good is an innately superior palate, we wonder, when the well-heeled mediocrities who flock to multistar restaurants might not be able to taste the difference between a stunning risotto and an ordinary one, and -- gasp -- might not really care that they can't? Eating at a restaurant is an experience, and the Michelin guide doesn't share that.To avoid "buying in" to Michelin's oft-criticized process, we're not going to waste space on localized gripes regarding how the Bay Area's latest assortment of stars were distributed -- except to say that they ought to have put some Asian spots "on the wall." Whoops, that slipped out. We promise we'll stop. We can hardly afford to eat at any of these restaurants anyway -- save for Aziza, maybe Range on a good night, and Range -- though tasty -- doesn't deserve a star any more than perhaps a half-dozen other restaurants just a force-fed goose's waddle away from Valencia and 19th. Uh-oh, we're doing it again. Sorry. Don't mind us.
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